The SF Mayoral Race: Ed Lee

Over the past eight weeks, KALW News has been bringing you the sound of the new season – no, not football or prime time television – but politics.

We’ve had extensive conversations with each of the 16 San Francisco mayoral candidates, and throughout these interviews, one name has come up over and over again: Ed Lee.

GERRY SHIH: Mr. Lee’s name had been bubbling for weeks at City Hall – but nobody kind of thought it was realistic, simply because he had refused to do the job. He said he wanted to keep a city administrator’s job. He’s a low-key, kind of quiet guy, likes to stay out of the limelight, doesn’t like any of the political drama.

We spoke with Bay Citizen reporter Gerry Shih earlier this year, right before the city’s Board of Supervisors voted Lee to take the place of former Mayor Gavin Newsom. Since then, Lee has transformed from a little-known city administrator into the city’s top candidate for mayor. And his rise hasn’t been without controversy.

KALW’s Ben Trefny sat down with Mayor Lee in Studio B, and began by asking about the neighborhood the current mayor lives in.

* * *

ED LEE: I live in the Glen Park neighborhood, so that’s kind of in the center of things. Glen Park is kind of the southern part of the city, so we’re just off of I-280, you get off at the Monterey Boulevard exit. And you go right up and we’re on top of the hill, behind what a lot of the neighborhood folks call the Blue School, which is the Glen Park Elementary School that just got renovated and has just reopened.

BEN TREFNY: Starting in Glen Park then, since you’re mayor of the city, I’d kind of like to go around the city and talk about some of the different neighborhoods and then get your thoughts on those. Let’s head just a little bit south of Glen Park to Visitacion Valley, Excelsior, and Ingleside.

LEE: Well I certainly have all the time in my own mind comparing what’s positively happening in my neighborhood because there’s very few vacancies in the storefronts. As soon as I get to the Outer Mission, Excelsior, which is just literally about a mile away, I do see some storefronts that are vacant. And the merchants there, and the residents there, and the supervisor of that district has asked me to pay a lot more attention to that area…

BEN TREFNY: John Avalos.

LEE: Yeah, and I’ve enjoyed walking with him through the district. We had a couple walks by ourselves through the Balboa BART station and we made some comparisons and immediately, I was able to help him make some immediate improvements – cleaning up some physical improvements, some balance between the station operators and the maintenance operations that are out there with the community who wanted a little more safer routes.

TREFNY: Let’s go into my neighborhood: the Sunset and Golden Gate Park. What are your impressions of those neighborhoods?

LEE: You know they’re beautiful, beautiful areas, of course. And I was out there part of the Outside Lands… There is a tremendous effort going on by the residents to do a lot of private volunteerism to improve their schools, improve their neighborhood parks. This public-private partnership that we’ve got going with Recreation and Parks – particularly around and in the parks at Golden Gate – I think are lovely.

TREFNY: Now we’ve lost a lot of gardeners in Golden Gate Park out there over the last few years. There have been trees falling in Golden Gate Park – how do you solve some of those issues in that area?

LEE: Well the public-private partnerships that we’re developing are really supporting the parks now. But we’ve got a new program that just started on October 1, some 200 people have been hired through our human services agency. One hundred of them are dedicated to the parks, and they’re going to help the full-time maintenance folks clean the parks. This is job training for people on welfare through the Cal Works program and other programs. One hundred of them are dedicated to the streets cleaning program – you see them already; they’re in the merchant corridors as we talk… And I think you’re going to see a tremendous turnaround resulting from the next year of this additional 100 people out there.

TREFNY: The economy is really the biggest topic on the table for all the candidates right now, and everyone has their different jobs programs. You mentioned one there. What do you see as the future for the economy and jobs in San Francisco?

LEE: Well certainly jobs growth and economic stability – that’s my number one focus. And for the next four years, if I’m privilege to be the mayor of San Francisco, I’m going to keep creating jobs. I know that saving Twitter was one of the biggest decisions that our office working with the Board of Supervisors was able to do, because we literally saved 2,500 jobs leaving the city. These are jobs that are predicted to job in the next year and a half.

What resonated was not only did we do that for that company and for San Franciscans, we did it in the way in which it would immediately revitalize Mid-Market. And that’s what I want to do with every merchant corridor of the city.

TREFNY: Being a true city veteran you know that there have been a lot of efforts to revitalize Mid-Market, for decades and decades and decades. Why would this be successful as compared to other ones? I mean I’m sure that people were just as optimistic as you are…

LEE: We learned a lot of the lessons from the past failures. And we know that there can’t just be one aspect to do it; you can’t just rely on a Twitter. What we’re doing is we’re putting together whole packages of things: small loans programs, hiring, arts, as well as more safety. We’ve got a sub-station that’s going in.

But we’re not even waiting for the sub-station. I already activated our civic engagement division from the city administrator’s office – something very successful that we created was the community ambassador program. Something that I talk with even the owners of Twitter were concerned about was that they wanted the safety of their workforce to be very positive. And once you get safety in there, you’re going to have a lot of businesses that want to locate. And it’s much safer today than it was literally a year ago.

The community ambassadors program is going to have local people hired within the community to be additional eyes and ears to watch what happens on the street – especially those hours where people are going to work and coming off of work late at night. We’re going to have additional eyes to help the police.

TREFNY: I want to do some quick word association. Give a thought on the word or phrase that I say. “Being the first Chinese American mayor in San Francisco.”

LEE: Proud. Also a chance to say as an Asian American who has spent a professional career up here, what can I do to help everybody and to share the values that my family has with every neighborhood in the city. I’m very proud to do that.

TREFNY: “Chinatown.”

LEE: Well Chinatown – very big attraction but struggling community. A lot of elderly, a lot of poor behind the facades. For me, helping build the Central Subway to help connect north and south into Chinatown is going to be very important.

TREFNY: “Rose Pak.”

LEE: Good leader of the Chinese Chamber of Commerce. I listen to her but I also listen to everybody else. I listen to a lot of people to make sure that I get good input. I get her input as well, but I have to make my own decisions.

TREFNY: “The Go Lorrie investigation.”

LEE: You know, I wanted to make sure… I expect 100% compliance with our campaign, and we have it. We’ve opened up our books and we made sure that our district attorney who is probing this has got a good look at what we’ve done, so I’m very confident that we’ll be found to not be the target of this. Having said that, you know I want to expect everybody who’s working with my camp to be compliant, 100%, with every law. And those that think that they’re supporting me by doing things that might be questionable, they’re going to have to own up to that. They’re going to have to be accountable to it, but we’re running a clean campaign and that’ll be shown, and I’m very confident that we’ll proceed forward on this. Again, anybody who thinks that they’re supporting me and they do questionable things, they’re going to be personally accountable to that and I strongly encourage that they comply with the law – everybody has to do that.

TREFNY: Why should voters elect you to this position?

LEE: I’m excited about this city, I love it, I’ve been leading it, I’ve been demonstrating what I can do the first nine months as mayor.

I’m enthusiastic about every neighborhood of this city, and I want to make sure everyone is connected. I think that my leadership and my brand of style, putting people together, solving problems together, resonates with everybody. They don’t want to see political factions be resulting from what’s happening in Sacramento or even in Washington DC. I think our city is unique because we do come together. Why not do it more on a consistent basis, led by a mayor who loves every neighborhood of the city and wants it to connect up?